Chapter 3: Flutter UI: Important Widgets, Theme, and Layout

Chapter 4 from Flutter in Action by Eric Windmill

In this chapter:

Flutter isn’t just a framework. It’s a complete SDK. And, perhaps the most exciting piece of this SDK to me, as a web developer, is the massive library of built-in widgets that make building the 'front-end' of your mobile app easy.

This chapter, and the following two, are going to be all about user-interface and making an app beautiful. This chapter includes exploring some of the widgets built into Flutter, layout, styling, and more. In the following chapters, I’ll go a bit further into UI and talk about forms and user input, as well animations.

This is the app I’ll use to explain UI in Flutter in the next few chapters.

In this chapter, in particular, we’ll look at these high-level categories:

4.1  Setting up and configuring a Flutter app

4.2  Structural Widgets and more configuration

4.3  Styling in Flutter and Theme

4.4  Common Layout and UI widgets

4.5  ListView and Builders

4.6  Summary